OK, I’ll be honest. I enjoyed X-Com, for what it was but felt no desire to get really invested in it. I bounced off X-Com 2 several times - the strategy layer, I just can’t get my head around it.

Duskers… you know how people who love the X-Com games, love that fear of the death of their soldier, how they get attached to a name. How they feel loss, and mourn if someone really special dies. Well, I just lost Pipewrench, and had to hold off tears. I feel sick and can’t bear to play again. I finally have a game which gives me that X-Com feeling!

The little black box is the robot, the green spheres mark the centers of open areas.

The robot has a kinect on top, we see what the kinect sees as a 3D cloud of grey points.

I am compelled to say, the visualisation (rviz) is usually much cleaner and clearer than this. I just for a moment wish to pretend that my house is a derelict spaceship, and that my cat is a hideous alien.

I’ve played about two hours so far. Frodo and Sam have explored half a dozen derilicts, and have been joined by Merry, Pippin and Fatty. Early days yet, but I’m really enjoying the tension and atmosphere. I am very much aware that it’s been relatively plain sailing so far, so I’m expecting the tension to start ratcheting up as the infestation starts to increase and the state of the derilicts becomes more unstable.

Lost my first campaign by leaving a door wide open to my main group of drones.
Lost my second when something came out the vents.
Lost my third when I flushed my two best drones out the airlock with a beastie, rather than herding him and towing them back.

Fourth time I’ve got some shields and turrets set up, but my only motion tracker just broke.
Its not going to end well.

“Scan Inconclusive” is now my least favourite phrase in the world. A simple tip for those starting out, holding Ctrl and pressing up goes to the last console command typed, perfect for when you’re opening a door and have a feeling that you might need to close it very quickly.

[spoiler]So, I decided I was done exploring the current derelict and just wanted to collect the scrap and leave. Completely confident, I typed “open all” (which I NEVER DO) to ease my gathering, and directed all of my drones back to my docked ship.

…Except I’d forgotten about a contained radiation leak, which immediately starts spreading through the ship like wildfire. With my generator drone now on his way home, I can’t close the doors again.

“That’s ok,” I think. “I can outrun this.” Whereupon my lead drone discovers that the single corridor connecting to my ship is now packed with slime.

My solution: The third drone in my cramped queue of drones has a turret, but being in range of the slime requires me to creep drone no. 1 forward, then no. 2, then no. 3, then activate the turret, then do the entire process again, OVER AND OVER AGAIN. It turned Duskers into The Typing of the Dead. I failed to escape before the radiation leak caught me and I lost the entire campaign.[/spoiler]

I got in something of a design discussion with my buddies about it. I’m a champion of the drones being drones, but some folks think they’d be better as people.

My Thinking: As drones with human names, the drones come across as pets. They are pretty mindless, but they do just enough unexpected stuff that they develop sort-of personality quirks. This makes them relatable without it being annoying when they don’t react like people would. They’re just drones, after all.

Their Thinking: People with faces are always easier to empathize with. They could speak to you - even just as response barks to commands - and they could easily become as beloved as XCOM soldiers.

So, my fellow Duskersians, would the drones be more interesting as people?